Japanese Company Plans a $20 Billion Investment in India’s Solar Market

Stephen Lacey is a contributing editor with Greentech Media. He is also the founder and executive producer of Post Script Media. Lacey produces and hosts The Energy Gang and Interchange podcasts, two of the most popular podcasts on energy and cleantech.

Japan's SoftBank Corp., together with Bharti Enterprises and Taiwan's Foxconn, will invest about $20 billion in solar projects in India, in one of the biggest investment pledges to date in the country's renewable energy sector.

SoftBank, which previously said it would invest $10 billion in India over time, said on Monday the companies had agreed a minimum commitment of generating 20 gigawatts of energy.

Chinese tycoon Li Hejun throttled his company into the solar industry five years ago just as China was investing tens of billions of dollars to create national champions in the renewable energy sector.

Hanergy and its Hong Kong listed unit, Hanergy Thin Film Power Group Ltd., have taken advantage of the solar industry’s wider problems by buying multiple U.S. and European thin film companies that were struggling.

But each of those technologies has constraints, industry analysts say. As a result, thin film’s market share has stayed flat around 10% in recent years, according to industry estimates. Hanergy’s own panels have accounted for just a fraction of that, they say.

Over the last 20 years, there have been 1.2M granted patents and published patent applications from across the U.S., Europe and some world territories, on the cleantech patenting site CleanTech PatentEdge.

Of course, many of these ideas may never see the light of day or are unworkable on a mass scale, so what are the more realistic and practical innovations? We’ve picked out five technologies that are worth keeping an eye on.

The Obama administration on Friday proposed tough new standards to improve fuel efficiency and reduce carbon dioxide pollution from trucks and vans, the latest move by President Barack Obama to address global warming.

The new rules are designed to slash heat-trapping carbon emissions by 24 percent by 2027 while reducing oil consumption by up to 1.8 billion barrels over the lifetime of the vehicles sold under the rule.

As oil prices waver and the world’s power brokers scramble, a fundamental, burning question is growing: What exactly is oil?

What is seemingly a simple question is becoming harder to answer. From its sheer volumes to what it’s made of and its environmental impacts, the next century of oil will likely be very different from the last. Despite John D. Rockefeller’s successful corporate marketing, there is no standard oil.